One late October day, I’m driving my dad to the store and I comment on the signs for the mayor’s race that are currently posted at every street corner in our town.
“It really ticks me off,” says my father, “that neither of these candidates say whether they’re a Democrat or a Republican.”
“Well, “ I say, “It’s pretty common that small-town municipal races aren’t run as partisan affairs”
“But I don’t want to vote for someone with Democratic principles!”
“Oh, so you’re opposed to democracy?” He knows that I’m teasing him.
“No, that’s not what I mean!”
I know that’s not what he means. For some reason, he believes that Democrats are the root of all his problems. When his neurologist asks him how he likes the retirement community where he lives, he tells him that the food isn’t as good as it used to be because Joe Biden has caused the price of eggs and dairy to go up.
“You know,” I say, “In a town like this, most of the issues are really pretty basic. Making sure the streets are clean and the lights work and that the [seemingly] hundreds of festivals always happening in the town square run smoothly. I don’t think it needs to be partisan. We all have to live here, and making it into a fight between Republicans and Democrats would make it harder for everyone to work together and make this a nice place to live.”
My dad takes several beats to respond. He’s had a traumatic brain injury and a stroke, and it takes him a while to find his words. When he finally does, they are weighted with all the intensity he typically applies to his denunciations of Biden:
“Rebekah, that is a… very… good… point.”
I wasn’t always so sanguine toward my father’s political convictions. I’ve spent a good 20 years at odds with him. As I write this, I’m searching my memory for anecdotes to illustrate how things used to be between us, but I can’t seem to reproduce a coherent scene. All I get are waves of emotion and flashes of angry words and bitter denunciations, particularly at election time.
Racist. Sexist. Stupid.
I see myself telling him he doesn’t understand anything because he’s brain-damaged and he ought to just shut up and stop ruining everything. I remember saying it doesn’t matter what he thinks because he’s old and he’ll die soon and the world will finally be free of his bigoted, backwards beliefs. I’m glad I don’t talk like that anymore
It’s Fall 2016 and I’m working a five-month contract in a small city in Eastern Washington. It’s strange to be away from a city like LA or DC— the kinds of coastal urban enclaves where I’ve spent my entire life. It’s not just the lack of hipsters, lefty activists, and ambitious professionals that makes the place feel so surreal. The landscape itself is entirely alien, all windswept plateaus and cracked canyons carved out by massive floods from glacial melt during the last ice age. They call it the channeled scablands, and scientists have compared it to the surface of Mars.
There are two industries in this town. One is farming, only possible here in a narrow, fertile strip of the Columbia River valley. The other is containment and cleanup of nuclear waste. A few miles to the north, toxic sludge left over from plutonium processing for the Manhattan Project leaches into the ground, absorbed by the river before it flows down to irrigate the crops— alfalfa and corn used to feed livestock, but also the apples, cherries, berries, and grapes that will be shipped to supermarkets all over the country.
There are three towns here, huddled together in this valley oasis. The next town over is where all the Latino farm workers live, and the only place with decent Mexican food. I’m surprised when I see how many of the people there are wearing Trump hats and T-shirts. It doesn’t fit the story I have about who I’m aligned with and which side I’m on. Isn’t Trump the enemy of immigrants? In Los Angeles where the legacy of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers still reverberates, it’s easy to assume that brown skin equals Democrat.
I tell myself that these people obviously don’t understand. They’ve been sadly manipulated and led astray, victims of poverty and a lack of education. But a few weeks later I wake with a jolt in the middle of the night and anxiously check my phone to find that the unthinkable has occurred. Donald Trump is our new president. I start to wonder if perhaps I’m the one who doesn’t understand.
When I go to work the next day, many of my co-workers are exultant. A few of us are quiet and shell-shocked, and we look at one another and softly ask one another how we’re doing. In the OR, a surgeon and an anesthesiologist nearly come to blows and have to be separated. I feel a buzzing sensation as if the picture on the screen I call life is dissolving into static.
I heard a story once about a man who smoked Salvia, or maybe DMT, and was transported into an entirely different reality, one as solid and tangible as the place you’re in now. In this alternate world, he lived in a town in Texas, a state he had never seen before, and counted apples in a warehouse. He had a whole life full of friends who seemed to have known him from childhood, and they were as real as his wife and children from the before times. After several years spent counting apples in Texas, the ground beneath his feet dissolved and he woke up in his living room. He had been passed out cold for less than five minutes. Maybe I too have found my way into one of these sideways worlds.
Earlier that year, back in Los Angeles, I had a dream. In it, I’m on a high bank overlooking a river, surrounded by tall trees. The river is flowing lazily, and I can see in the distance another river with rushing water. I know I want that river, the fast one. The only way to get over there is to swing overhand through the treetops. My arms are weak and it takes everything I have to swing hand over hand, like Tarzan, through the trees. I finally make it and collapse on the bank of the second river before catching a boat downstream. The river empties into Puget Sound, and I realize then that the first river would have taken me here just as well and with less effort. Either way, Puget Sound is my destination, and now I’m here. When I wake, I know I have to move there. I have an inkling I’m going to meet a teacher when I arrive.
That’s the reason I’m here in eastern Washington. It’s a brief detour, a way to charge up my bank account before moving to Tacoma and finding a lower-paying but more flexible job. In January of 2017, I finally arrive, and within a week I am introduced to a woman who teaches a year-long psychic development program. It’s about to begin, and I have a few days to decide. I go for it.
That begins a very trippy and magical year. I am hoping to learn all the secrets of the universe, and most importantly, how to control it. How to get what I want and make sure things go my way. I never figure that out, but I learn something more valuable instead.
In the psychic program, we learn to perceive and make sense of our own energy field and that of others. We learn to read auras with clear spiritual sight. The key to seeing other people clearly, we are told, is the willingness to see ourselves clearly. Everything we perceive in others is a reflection of something in ourselves. The more we can see through our own delusions, the more insight and clarity we have to offer others.
We are to treat every person we meet as an opportunity for growth and healing. The more they trigger and irritate us, the bigger the opportunity. It’s not about trying to fix the other person. When you try to change someone else, says the teacher, you are creating them in your own image. When you allow Spirit to use these irritations as a mirror, you have an opportunity to let your own shit go.
Over the next few years, I start to experience situations that weirdly imitate the past. I have a strangely specific battle with a roommate that plays like a rerun of a fight I used to have with a boyfriend, only this time I’m on the opposite side. It feels like I’m fighting with an earlier version of myself. Is this what I’m like, I wonder. I see clearly, and it sucks, for a minute. But it’s also freeing.
I notice the way I hold my phone at night, scrolling until my thumb aches, searching out any bit of news that will feed my unquiet mind. Trump’s latest defector, a new climate disaster, a fresh assault on women’s rights. I clickety click click click my way to 2 AM, before I finally force myself to put the damn thing down and turn out the lights. I tell myself that I have to stay aware of all the terrible things that are happening, but I think I know deep down that some part of me gets off on the outrage. It affirms my sense of righteousness. I think about my Dad, staying up late, unable to switch off Fox News. Are we really that different?
I remember once hearing an organizer tell his story at an activist training. It’s a lot like hearing a testimony at a camp meeting. In this case, he talked about growing up in a politically active family. His mother instilled in him the importance of struggle. Life is nothing but struggle, she told him, and you must always keep fighting, no matter what. That was it, that was the point of his story. That and the fact that she died young of a chronic illness. I couldn’t help but wonder— did her belief in struggle become a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I looked at the people around me and thought about the stories we were telling, stories of injustice and oppression and the fight between good and evil. We loved the idea that we were fighting for the truth. What would happen if all the things we said we wanted were fulfilled, I wondered. An end to war, the dismantling of capitalism, and full equality for all people. Would we even know who we were anymore? Or would we have to create new injustices to fight against? Was I doing that now, creating enemies in my mind and somehow willing them into being?
Our stories of struggle, oppression, and righteous rage are like the toxic remnants of a long-ago war still poisoning our minds and bodies. But does it really have to be that way?
*
Here’s the thing about the fearless moral inventory we’re asked to perform in the 12 steps. We think it’s about making a list of every bad thing we’ve done so we can submit to some kind of cosmic spanking. We think it’s about facing the music and taking our punishment stoically before turning to walk the straight and narrow.
But I think, really, it’s about seeing that we’re not any different than the people we’ve been blaming and demonizing. We’re just as frightened, just as wounded, just as delusional as they are. When we let ourselves see this truth without fear, we finally open ourselves to love. Love from God, love for ourselves and love with another. We can begin to stop telling the story that we are somehow special— more depraved, more righteous, more misunderstood. Whatever the story, is, it’s a lie. We’re not really any different than anyone else.
We might have important disagreements, and we might even be more correct on some of them. But that doesn’t make us better people. As St. Paul says, “There is none righteous, no, not one.” And thank God for that. It means we can stop pretending. It’s a beautiful gift of solidarity and freedom. Now we can stop holding ourselves apart from other people, from God, from life— and finally let ourselves fully participate.
This is an extract from Rebekah Berndt’s series on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and how they might be applied to the problem of ideological and political polarization. This reflection examines the fourth step, “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”